Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of image processing, and more particularly to the field of tonal balancing of ortho-rectified images for the sake of building a mosaic.
Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art, tonal balancing of ortho-rectified images generated from multiple raw source images is a tedious, inefficient and highly manual process. Currently, the practical scalability of existing algorithms (both in terms of computer run-time and resulting tonal consistency across images) drops off substantially after about a dozen or so images.
What is needed is a method of tonal balancing that can balance large numbers of ortho-rectified images automatically as part of a production process. Two types of solution are of interest: In relative tonal balancing, adjacent or overlapping input images are to be tonally balanced to each other. In global base-layer matching, input images are to be tonally matched to a reference base-layer.